The U.S. State Department does not want the government of Syria to
defeat or weaken ISIS, at least not if doing so means any sort of gain
for the Syrian government. Watching a recent video
of a State Department spokesperson speaking on that subject might
confuse some U.S. war supporters. I doubt many residents of Palmyra,
Virginia, or Palmyra, Pennsylvania, or Palmyra, New York could give a
coherent account of the U.S. government's position on which enemy should
control the ancient Palmyra in Syria.

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The U.S. government has been arming
Al Qaeda in Syria. I doubt many people in the United States, of
whatever political extraction, could explain why. In my experience,
having just begun a tour of speaking events,
very few in the United States can even name the seven nations that
President Barack Obama has bragged about bombing, much less explain
which parties he is or is not bombing in those countries. No nation in
the history of the world has had so many enemies to keep track of as the
United States has now, and bothered so little about doing so.

The particular problem with Syria is that the U.S. government has
prioritized one enemy, whom it has utterly failed to scare the U.S.
public with, while the U.S. government has made a distant second
priority of attacking another enemy that most people in the United
States are so terrified of they can hardly think straight. Consider what
changed between 2013 and 2014. In 2013, President Obama was prepared to
heavily bomb the Syrian government. But he did not claim that the
Syrian government wanted to attack the United States, or even to attack a
handful of white people from the United States. Instead he argued,
unpersuasively, that he knew who was responsible for killing Syrians
with chemical weapons. This was in the midst of a war in which thousands
were dying on all sides from all kinds of weapons. The outrage over a
particular type of weapon, the dubious claims, and the eagerness to
overthrow a government, were all too close to U.S. memories of the 2003
attack on Iraq.

Congress Members in 2013 found themselves at public events confronted
with the question of why the U.S. would overthrow a government in a war
on the same side as al Qaeda. Were they going to start another Iraq
War? U.S. and British public pressure reversed Obama's decision. But
U.S. opinion was even more against arming proxies, and a new CIA report
said that doing so had never worked, yet that was the approach Obama
went with. The overthrow, which Hillary Clinton still says should have
happened, would have quickly created the chaos and terror that Obama set
about developing slowly.

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In 2014, Obama was able to step up direct U.S. military action in
Syria and Iraq with virtually no resistance from the public. What had
changed? People had heard about videos of ISIS killing white people with
knives. It didn't seem to matter that jumping into the war against ISIS
was the opposite side from what Obama had said in 2013 the U.S. needed
to join. It didn't even seem to matter that the U.S. clearly intended to
join in both sides. Nothing related to logic or sense mattered
in the least. ISIS had done a little bit of what U.S. allies in Saudi
Arabia and Iraq and elsewhere did routinely, and had done it to
Americans. And a fictional group, even scarier, the Khorasan Group, was
coming to get us, ISIS was slipping across the border from Mexico and
Canada, if we didn't do something really big and brutal we were all
going to die.

That being why the U.S. public finally said yes to open-ended war
again -- after really not falling for the lies about a humanitarian
rescue in Libya, or not caring -- the U.S. public naturally assumes that
the U.S. government has prioritized destroying the evil dark force of
Islamic Terror. It hasn't. The U.S. government says to itself, in its
little-noticed reports, that ISIS is no threat to the United States. It
knows perfectly well, and its top commanders blurt it out upon
retirement, that attacking terrorists only strengthens
their forces. The U.S. priority remains overthrowing the Syrian
government, ruining that country, and creating chaos. Here's part of
that project: U.S.-backed troops in Syria fighting other U.S. backed troops in Syria. That's not incompetence if the goal is to destroy a nation, as it seems to be in Hillary Clinton's emails - (the following is a draft of this article):

"The best way to help Israel deal with Iran's growing nuclear
capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar
Assad. ... Iran's nuclear program and Syria's civil war may seem
unconnected, but they are. For Israeli leaders, the real threat from a
nuclear-armed Iran is not the prospect of an insane Iranian leader
launching an unprovoked Iranian nuclear attack on Israel that would lead
to the annihilation of both countries. What Israeli military leaders
really worry about -- but cannot talk about -- is losing their nuclear
monopoly. ... It is the strategic relationship between Iran and the
regime of Bashar Assad in Syria that makes it possible for Iran to
undermine Israel's security."

ISIS, Al Qaeda, and terrorism are far better tools for marketing wars
than communism ever was, because they can be imagined using knives
rather than nukes, and because terrorism can never collapse and vanish.
If (counterproductively) attacking groups like al Qaeda were what
motivated the wars, the United States would not be aiding Saudi Arabia
in slaughtering the people of Yemen and increasing the power of Al Qaeda
there. If peace were the goal, the U.S. would not be sending troops
back into Iraq to use the same actions that destroyed that country to
supposedly fix it. If winning particular sides of wars were the main
objective, the United States would not have served as the primary funding for both sides in Afghanistan for all these years, with decades more planned.

Why did Senator Harry Truman say the United States should help either
the Germans or the Russians, whichever side was losing? Why did
President Ronald Reagan back Iraq against Iran and also Iran against
Iraq? Why could fighters on both sides in Libya exchange parts for their
weapons? Because two goals that outweigh all others for the U.S.
government often align in the cause of sheer destruction and death. One
is U.S. domination of the globe, and all other peoples be damned. The
second is arms sales. No matter who's winning and who's dying, the
weapons makers profit, and the majority of weapons in the Middle East
have been shipped there from the United States. Peace would cut into
those profits horribly.

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)